May 23 · This Day in America
For two years, in the worst of the Depression, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow have run — banks, filling stations, gun battles, jailbreaks, thirteen killings, photographs mailed to newspapers, a public half in love with anyone striking back at a system that had failed them. Now their luck runs out at dawn. Six lawmen, led by the former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, lie hidden in the brush along the highway near Sailes, Louisiana. At 9:15 a.m. the stolen Ford comes down the road. The posse opens fire — one hundred and sixty-seven rounds in seconds. It is over almost before it begins. The legend, though, does not die in that car. America keeps arguing about what they were: monsters, victims, folk heroes, a love story with a body count. The desperation that made them famous was real, and so were the people they killed.
Source: www.fbi.gov
Also on this day · 1903
On a wager made days earlier in a San Francisco club, Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson and mechanic Sewall Crocker point a secondhand Winton east. There are almost no roads, no gas stations, and barely any maps. They pick up a goggled bulldog named Bud along the way. Sixty-three days and countless breakdowns later they reach New York — the first people to drive an automobile across America.
Source: www.pbs.org